


she gathers you

by EskelChopChop



Series: we in the leviathan, looking for joy [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Angst, F/M, POV Second Person, Trauma, a lot of hurt with a hope of comfort, no beta we go gently into that good night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22738693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EskelChopChop/pseuds/EskelChopChop
Summary: Takes place at the end of "The Last Wish" short story / Season 1 Episode 5 of the TV show. Dialogue from the short story.A little drabble in which Geralt isn't sure he can be what he wants to be for Yennefer.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: we in the leviathan, looking for joy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2024957
Comments: 16
Kudos: 61





	she gathers you

**Author's Note:**

> Title riffs on a passage from Toni Morrison’s _Beloved_

“That wish of yours,” Yennefer whispers. “I heard what you wished for.” 

She doesn’t understand. Standing in that ruined house in Rinde, the djinn newly fled, you’re not sure you do, either. You saw a sorceress wrestling a djinn, for power, for everything, and you thought you heard something in her voice. An emptiness crying out. You carry your own emptiness. It has been a long time since you’ve felt it-- not a long time since the last woman, but since one mattered. So you reached out to that emptiness with your own and made your wish. Now the two of you stand whole amidst rubble, survivors, leaning toward each other. 

She is powerful, Yennefer. Powerful enough to make pieces that you thought were gone vibrate inside you. They’re scattered, razed. But Yen is powerful enough to make you remember them. She could be world enough to make her own gravity, a gravity that coheres you.

The sorceress who battled a djinn is soft, petite. Her power is in her eyes. You lean against her, bridging the final distance, and she cradles you as if nothing has a right to break you. You wonder what it’s like to be unbroken. Sacrosanct.

There are too many barriers between you. She disrobes and your armor thuds to the floor, cast-off shells among the debris. You’re revealed. 

You are scars and calluses, a ruined body in a ruined house, and she regards the wreckage with perfect violet eyes. You want another body to give her. But this one is all you have. You have to make it known. The body is fact. You don’t need to be ashamed of facts, things already happened-- so you say to yourself. 

So you show her. Here are the cat eyes that they burned into your skull with herbs and mutagens, the senses that sing you her heartbeat and feel the air anointed with lilac and gooseberries. Here are the scars made by monsters. Every contract leaves a mark. They’ve marked you so often, the monsters you meet, they’ve made you half-monster too, a golem built from the teeth and claws and beaks they imbedded in you.

Your body is not a body. It is the site of a massacre. It is old ravaged country where the fields are filled with corpses and you cannot offer this to her. To Yennefer, whose body is holy ground to your mass grave. 

But this is all that’s left of you. So you offer it, a supplicant. 

She looks at you. At everything you are. She sees and asks: “What made you do it, Geralt? Why… Why me?”

“Don’t you know?”

Yennefer leans over you. Her hair brushes over the skin of your shoulder and here it is skin that can do more than be wounded. She frames your face in her hands and it’s as if she’s found what used to be there-- something unspoiled, undesecrated, as if she can pull your pieces from the ruins and make you right again.

“Yennefer,” you say, and you wonder: what if you were more than a memorial to a massacre? Can you come alive for this woman? Can you remember where all of your missing pieces have gone?

“Geralt,” she says, as if she knows and the two of you can find them.


End file.
